Re: Commit instructions

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2013-10-18 at 13:36 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I stumbled upon 2 issues while committing changes for which I seem to
> be unable to find instructions:

Thanks for those changes Eli.

One question; I've seen this in other places as well but I don't
understand it: is there a purpose to indenting the body of the commit
message by one space?

Also, if we're going to be following ChangeLog conventions wouldn't each
section be preceded by a "*"?  E.g., instead of this:

|Fix MinGW64 problem with non-compliant vsnprintf.
|
| makeint.h (__USE_MINGW_ANSI_STDIO) [__MINGW64_VERSION_MAJOR]:
| Define for MinGW64, to force it to use an ANSI-compliant
| implementation of vsnprintf.  Reported by Christian Boos
| <address@hidden>.

Wouldn't we have this:

|Fix MinGW64 problem with non-compliant vsnprintf.
|
|* makeint.h (__USE_MINGW_ANSI_STDIO) [__MINGW64_VERSION_MAJOR]:
|Define for MinGW64, to force it to use an ANSI-compliant
|implementation of vsnprintf.
|Reported by Christian Boos <address@hidden>.

Or something like that?

Just wondering if I'm missing something.

>   . Changes submitted by people who don't have copyright assignment on
>     file.  These were marked "tiny changes" in the ChangeLog files,
>     but now we need to make sure these marks will get propagated to
>     ChangeLog when the release is tarred.  How to format these
>     attributes?

The gitlog-to-changelog script I'm currently using (from gnulib) gives
this information:

SPECIAL SYNTAX:

The following types of strings are interpreted specially when they appear
at the beginning of a log message line.  They are not copied to the output.

  Copyright-paperwork-exempt: Yes
    Append the "(tiny change)" notation to the usual "date name email"
    ChangeLog header to mark a change that does not require a copyright
    assignment.
  Co-authored-by: Joe User <address@hidden>
    List the specified name and email address on a second
    ChangeLog header, denoting a co-author.
  Signed-off-by: Joe User <address@hidden>
    These lines are simply elided.

>   . How to mark changes that resolve Savannah bugs?  Is there some
>     special git switch to do that?

Unfortunately Savannah has no integration with Git that I'm aware of, so
you have to continue to do this by hand.

I have been using the notation "[SV <bug#>]" in the commit summary line
to mark changes related to Savannah bugs, but that's just a style.